1. The Help Page describes the basic use of the Members-Only website.

2. Search fields are not case sensitive ('valliere' searches for 'Valliere', as well as 'Vallieres'). Women may be listed by Maiden or Married name.

3. Search results will include any words that 'contain' the search text, so a search for 'fran' will find 'Joseph Francois', 'Frank', 'Francis', 'Dufrane', as well as 'France'. If you enter multiple words, you will only get results that contain all of the words, in the order they were entered. So a search for 'jos francois' will NOT find 'Joseph Francois'. To locate words in a specific order, surround them with quotation marks, as in "Providence County".

4. Do not use accented letters, since a search for André (with accent) will not match Andre (without accent), and vice versa. The stored data does not include accents in the searchable fields.

5. Do not use hyphens in names like 'jean-baptiste'. Enter it as two words, or better yet, search each part of the name separately. Some records may only include 'jean' OR 'baptiste'. The stored data does not include hyphens in the searchable fields.

6. Avoid common words and names. For example; just enter 'louise' to find 'Marie Louise'; or enter 'baptiste' to find 'Jean Baptiste'.

7. Wildcards may be used, including the Percent-sign (%) or Asterisk (*) for 0 to many characters, and Question-mark (?) for any single character. Results will include any word that 'contains' the search text (ex; 'm%' will find 'marie', 'marguerite', 'martin', 'melissa', as well as 'marie elizabeth marguerite').

8. Use wildcards with caution. For example; a search for 'fr george' will not find 'Francois George', however searching for 'fr% george' (with the % wildcard) will find 'Francois George', as well as 'Francis George' and 'Frank George'.

9. Single words in each search field will yield more matches, and multiple words will reduce the number of matches. You may want to use multiple search words to target a specific name, but also consider single words to not miss single names (ie. In some records, 'Francois Xavier' may only be listed as 'Francois').

10. Enter partial text (with or without a wildcard) to find spelling variations. For example; 'jos' will find 'Joseph', 'Josephte', 'Josette', 'Josephine', as well as 'Marie Josephte'.

11. Use singular search words instead of the plural form. For example; The word 'soldier' will also find the plural 'soldiers', but not the other way around.

12. Don't forget to also search for the 'dit' names associated with the surname you are researching. Some records may only be listed by the 'dit' name.

13. Names and Places that contain the word 'Saint' or 'Sainte' should also be searched using the abbreviations 'St' or 'Ste' (without the period), instead of the full word.

14. Names and Places that contain a prefix, like 'dit', 'de', 'la', etc., should also be searched without the prefix.

15. Dates should include 'extra' years before and after the expected date to capture date variations within records.

16. Complete first and middle names are included in the stored data whenever possible. Abbreviations are only included if the full name is not listed in the record.

17. After a file opens, it may be searchable for specific text using [Ctrl]+[F], but this may not be available on some media, like tablets.

18. If a search finds more than 1000 results, add more detail to the 'search' fields to stay below 1000.

19. If a search returns only a few results, use less detail in the 'search' fields to obtain more matches.